[ENTERTAINMENT] Star Trek Episode Ratings - Star Trek: TNG - Season 1, Episode 3 (The Naked Now)

Lloenflys

"Certainty is an illusion ..."
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This was originally intended as a series that saw me get through an episode every day or two ... instead it's beetheren 48 days since I last reviewed an episode of Star Trek. Oh boy, not a good start. However, I shall not give up, and I finally got a chance to watch another episode tonight, so here is the next review! As a reminder, the scale I am Using to rate episodes is as follows:

A - Great episode, very rewatchable with excellent storytelling
B - Very good episode, rewatchable with few plot holes
C - Acceptable episode but nothing particularly outstanding - run of the mill
D - Poor episode - deficient in some way (characters acting abnormally, poor writing, etc.)
F - Unacceptable episode - Should be tossed into the bin and never dusted off again

+ or - grades of course are added to provide some further differentiation.

Star Trek: The Next Generation - Season 1, Episodes 3 - "The Naked Now"

The first stand-alone episode of the Next Generation opens with the Enterprise on a mission to figure out what is going on with the SS Tsiolkovsky - an Oberth-class ship that had been studying a dying star and which ceased regular contact with Starfleet. Upon investigating, the Enterprise crew discovered that the crew appeared to have lost all inhibitions and had been behaving quite irrationally. Shortly after returning to the Enterprise, Lieutenant La Forge began acting unusually ... and before long the strange behavior spread to the rest of the crew, with crewmembers losing their inhibitions and generally acting intoxicated. The crew recognized that something similar had happened to the crew of the original Enterprise (in an early episode of the Original Series titled "The Naked Time").

As the crew falls further into the clutches of the disease, Wesley Crusher takes over engineering ... and while he is playing engineer, an actual engineer pulls out a bunch of chips that are vital to the functioning of the Enterprise computer systems. After the nearby star explodes, the Enterprise has limited time to react before being destroyed ... and thankfully an intoxicated Data is able to replace the removed chips significantly faster than his human crewmembers could have done, even while affected by the disease which did not spare him. He needed just a moment more than he had, and thankfully for everyone Wesley was able to provide it by using the ships tractor beam functionality as a repulser beam. Good job Wesley, I'm sure no one in the fandom will begrudge your solving the major engineering problems encountered by the Enterprise despite just being a teenager! Nah, the fans will be thrilled you're there to save the day!

Notes of Interest

  • The Chief Engineer of the Enterprise was first introduced in this episode after not having been mentioned in the pilot episode. Her name - Lieutenant Commander Sarah MacDougal. If you're wondering why you don't remember anything about her and her amazing run as the Enterprise's Chief Engineer ... well, read future recaps. If you absolutely must know something now, let's just say that she never appears again and we never get any indication of what happened to her. That would ... not be the only time the Chief Engineer of the Enterprise disappeared during the first season of the Next Generation. Yeah, it was a whole thing.
  • That whole thing about Wesley saving the day? Well that would be a recurring theme in seasiion 1, and since the writers relied on it too frequently by far in Season 1, Wesley would indeed face major backlash as a character.
  • The writer of this episode was legendary Star Trek: Original Series writer DC Fontana ... but Gene Roddenberry added several sexual scenes to the script that she hadn't included and which she felt demeaned the female characters on the show, causing her to demand her name be withdrawn. A pseudonym was used instead for the writer of the episode.
  • Interestingly, one of the sexualized scenes that Fontana almost certainly is referring to is now one of the more iconic scenes for Data's character throughout the entire run of the show, after he is effectively propositioned by an infected Tasha Yar. This includes Data revealing to the audience that he is "fully functional" and "trained in multiple techniques." This was actually pretty funny, and is much chuckled at by fans of the character today ... but more importantly for the development of the character, and to the credit of the showrunners, they used this several times during the run of the show to establish the special relationship that existed between Data and Yar (despite her seeming embarrassment at what she had done and how she had acted after she was cured). Far from a casual event, this was actually something that was meaningful to Data's character and somehow that makes this throwaway bit of casual silliness rather more poignant than it probably has a right to be!
  • Data is a veritable fountain of quotes in this episode, from his conversation with Yar regarding his sexual abilities, to his paraphrase of Shakespeare ("We are more alike than unlike, my dear captain. I have pores. Humans have pores. I have fingerprints. Humans have fingerprints. My chemical nutrients are like your blood. If you prick me, do I not… leak?"). For my money, though, his best line comes in Engineering when he is working on replacing the isolinear chips that had been pulled out (and yeah, for the record, the Enterprise has externally accessible, removable chips that are necessary to run the ships computer ... and they are huge. Oh boy ...). After Riker points out to Data that they have 8 or 9 minutes to complete the task before the Enterprise is destroyed, he asks "can you finish by then?" Data responds matter-of-factly with "No, this will take slightly more time than we have sir." The combination of the deadpan delivery, Data's continuing to try to complete the task despite knowing their isn't enough time, and the inclusion of the word "slightly" all contributed to me finding this a hilarious bit of absurdist dialogue that was my favorite line of the episode.
Final Grade: C-

I am giving this episode a better grade than many do. A lot of fans, noting the episode's derivative nature (being seen by many as a rip-off of the Original Series) and the overt sexualization of several characters in this episode grade very lowly, as one of the worst episodes of the season. I actually kind of enjoy much of it, and think some of the dialogue is downright clever. The episode has major flaws but most of my complaints have more to do with when it was done in the run of the series than with the concepts used - for instance, the first standalone episode of a new series isn't, in my mind, the best time to introduce an illness that makes the characters act differently than they normally would because fans don't know how they normally act yet, so there is no baseline and you lose a significant portion of the impact of the episode. It also suffers from the "Wesley as Savior" trope as discussed above, which does detract from the episode. However, I don't actually hold rehashing ground from the Original Series is such a bad thing, especially when it meant that the original series events were specifically called out, establishing clearly the canonicity of the Original Series. All in all, while the episode could certainly be improved, I like it enough that it holds onto a C- over a D+ by a smidgen.
 
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